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Meeting ID: 838 4751 7121
Passcode: 879476

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Recently published secondary literature on popular culture during the Cold War has started to dismantle the once all powerful mantras that the Socialist Bloc was an impermeable system in which pop culture could exist only in samizdat form, or that state socialism was a unitary system and way of living. Transnational history, transfers, theories of consumption are useful methodological tools in dismantling simplistic perspectives, which owe more to Cold War perspectives than to historical research.

Notwithstanding, the recent events on the international arena have reminded us once more of Benedetto Croce’s famous dictum: “all genuine history is contemporary history”. We look at past events from the ever present and we shape our own understanding of historical events based on the cultural practices that we have adopted and on the milieu of which we are a part.

Stemming from an international workshop hosted by New Europe College on the topic of popular music across the Iron Curtain, this roundtable aims to provide an informal space for ruminating on our ego-histories, not just as personal experiences shared socially, but as an intellectual exercise on how our own cultural experiences form the scientific perspective from which we analyze culture. In this particular case, pop culture as a global phenomenon that we experience locally can prove a most valuable realm of investigative ego-history and present context analysis.

This roundtable is organized within the research project Rocking under the Hammer and the Sickle: Popular Music in Socialist Romania between Ideology and Entertainment (1948-1989) supported by UEFISCDI (Postdoctoral research PN-III-P1-1.1-PD-2021-0244) and New Europe College.